Kary Mullis the Nobel award winning inventor of PCR did too. He ends his book with this notion.
Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
21–30 of 184 posts
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#22TLDR Godel believed we lived in a rational world. "Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured."
> I like Jordan Peterson's evolutionary take on these philosophical questions
Why when actual evolutionary biologists disagree with Peterson on most of his "takes"?
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#23[flagged]
> I don't think it's news that clever people can believe utter nonsense Not that I necessarily agree with Godel’s specific views on the topic, but why do you get to determine what is “utter nonsense”? There’s clearly no consensus on the matter nor has there been for most of human existence. We’re not talking about some fringe belief like “brushing teeth is bad” that Feynman held.
I happen to disagree with the statements as presented but what he wrote is well reasoned in many aspects and he can bring to bear an incredible amount of intelligence to the matter. Like using the incompleteness theorem to argue that materialism (the belief that the only things true in this universe are what we can observe which is actually a core tenet underpinning the science philosophy since the enlightenment) must be false since incompleteness suggests there must be true things in the universe that can’t be proven through the laws within the universe. It’s a clever argument. The underpinning idea that the universe is rational seems like a leap and I’m sad his reasoning behind that isn’t articulated better. To me chaos theory suggests there’s probably no rationality and entropy suggest that order and rationality is a temporary ephemeral local phenomenon that degrades over time. While I disagree with Gödel on this, I wouldn’t be so bold as to discount his thoughts on the topic out of hand because they are sincerely argued by a person of great intelligence and intellect from their genuine exploration of the idea rather than appeals to authority or coming at it from a place of ignorance. If he’s wrong, his reasoning could still yield insights in how to approach the world.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#24[flagged]
> I don't think it's news that clever people can believe utter nonsense Not that I necessarily agree with Godel’s specific views on the topic, but why do you get to determine what is “utter nonsense”? There’s clearly no consensus on the matter nor has there been for most of human existence. We’re not talking about some fringe belief like “brushing teeth is bad” that Feynman held.
Because its one of hundreds of equally convoluted notions with no preferential evidence and fairly obvious flaws despite being supposedly divinely from an immaculate being and because it transcribes magical specialness to something that's frankly mundane.
What happens to the stream of outputs of this physical process when the physical process stops? I have a good guess.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#25Funny this came up. Just today I was reading about a letter Gödel wrote to von Neumann in 1956 asking him about an idea relating to the precursors of P vs NP and Hutter search ( https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/46ae... ). Gödel was quite ahead of his time. Even though he tended to prefer theory over practical applications, it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and in…
> it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning. For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.
I can understand the downvotes, but at the same time it does makes sense, especially given the target is a logician.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#26Funny this came up. Just today I was reading about a letter Gödel wrote to von Neumann in 1956 asking him about an idea relating to the precursors of P vs NP and Hutter search ( https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/46ae... ). Gödel was quite ahead of his time. Even though he tended to prefer theory over practical applications, it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and in…
> it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning. For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.
You’ll get an answer with all of the linguistic flavor of Gödel’s texts and absolutely none of his insights or reasoning.
LLM is a language model, not Deep Thought from the hitchhikers guide.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#27Hopefully as an FYI that is free of too much skeptical criticism (I mean... I actually get it, but I just don't want to deal with negativity right now), there's actually a rapidly growing number of NDE accounts on YouTube right now. I am putting together a playlist of the most compelling ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvnDbwjRqIOkgR1eUMfpn... Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, for…
Skepticism is indispensable precisely because smart people believe dumb ideas all the time. It's our only defense against flimflam and bad reasoning.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#28Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
Well, Maxwell was so impressed by the perfect similarity of the hydrogen molecules he concluded that they must have been created!
> No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.
> None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural.
> On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self existent.
> Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop. ... Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing ...
> ... But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built — the foundation stones of the material universe — remain unbroken and unworn.
> They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him Who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#29A reminder that even smart people are human and can get caught up in irrationality.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#30Is there a reason we should care about his belief regarding this? Putting aside that smart people in one realm are often quite irrational outside of their expertise, e.g. Isaac Newton being super dedicated to alchemy, Jack Parsons at JPL believing he could summon demons, there is also a quite obvious limitation to this line of evidence. I have very good reason to believe I'm going to survive the next five minutes. Th…
> Is there a reason we should care about his belief regarding this?
The scientific method proposes begining with conjectures, have Gödel's afterlife hypothesis been disproved? Could it be disproved? Can it trigger thoughts in an intelligence? Are those thoughts valued?